


Picking Up the Pieces

by SilenceIsGolden15



Series: Voltron Oneshots [50]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Aromantic Asexual Keith (Voltron), Aromantic Asexual Pidge | Katie Holt, Aromantic Keith (Voltron), Asexual Keith (Voltron), Bullying, Coming Out, Foster Kid Keith (Voltron), Galra Keith (Voltron), Gay Shiro (Voltron), Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Sexual Harassment, just a little bit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-10
Updated: 2019-06-10
Packaged: 2020-04-24 06:43:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19167892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilenceIsGolden15/pseuds/SilenceIsGolden15
Summary: Coming out is hard. Especially when your mom has been gone for seventeen years. Oh, and an alien.





	Picking Up the Pieces

**Author's Note:**

> This is the part where I tell you guys how absolutely ecstatic I am that Keith didn't end up with a romance.

He was ten years old, and he was eating an awkwardly quiet dinner with his first foster family. ‘Family’ was a term he enclosed with air quotes in his mind, since there was only the husband and the wife, unable to have children of their own. Keith hadn’t been able to recognize the look on the wife’s face when they first met, but in the future he would know it as the face of someone who’d anticipated fostering an adorable infant with no baggage attached, instead of a painfully shy child who still cried out for his father in his sleep.

“So, Keith,” said the husband, breaking the silence. The expression he wore was one of forced interest. “How do you like your new school?”

Keith gulped, his eyes flickering back down to his plate, which he’d barely touched. He didn’t like to talk, but the last time he’d tried to answer the way he’d communicated with his father, with nods and hums and signs, the wife had shouted at him for being rude. Her voice was scary when she shouted.

So he forced himself to say, as loudly as he dared, “I like it.”

It was kind of a lie, but the wife was watching him with dagger eyes, a tic to her jaw he’d learned to recognize as anger. He wasn’t going to take any risks. 

The husband nodded, pleased with his response. “Have you made any friends?”

Keith squirmed a bit, uncomfortable. If he was honest, no, he didn’t have any friends. He was too quiet and too new and his leg bouncing annoyed his table-mates. 

“Sit still,” the wife snapped, making him jump. “Your father asked you a question.”

Keith’s tongue burned with the words,  _ he’s not my father,  _ but he held them back.

“There’s Courtney,” he said, using the first name that popped into his brain, “She’s nice.” That wasn’t technically a lie; she had shown him around the room on the first day. She hadn’t spoken to him since, but still. 

For some reason that answer caught the husband’s attention. He leaned forward a bit over his plate, a knowing smirk on his lips. 

“Oh, got yourself a girlfriend already, eh? Is she pretty?”

“Um.” Keith didn’t know how to answer. Why did he care if Courtney was pretty? “I guess so?”

The husband wasn’t put off by his confusion. “Is she blonde or brunette?”

Keith shrank in his chair. He didn’t like this conversation. “She has red hair,” he murmured, and the husband gave a wolfish grin. 

“Just wait for high school, buddy. You’ll be a heartbreaker for sure.”

He didn’t know what that meant. He had no idea what any of it had meant, but even so he went to bed that night with a stomach ache that he didn’t understand. 

* * *

He really regretted saying yes to Shiro’s dinner invitation. He didn’t know the Holts at all. They were the ones going to Kerberos with Shiro-- why would they even care about him? He’d heard the whispers around school-- he was just Shiro’s stray. His charity case that just so happened to be good at flying. 

But Shiro had invited him, and he’d stupidly said yes, and now he sat quietly eating while the rest of the table buzzed around him with conversation. He was hoping he’d get through it without catching anyone’s attention, but alas, it was not to be. 

Captain Holt asked the first question-- or, rather, questions. 

“How are you finding the Garrison?” he asked, his bright, eager eyes shining from behind glasses. “Settling in alright? Got friends?”

God, Keith hated that question. The answer was always no, and he always had to lie.

“It’s fine,” he said, heaping mashed potatoes on his fork. “It’s nice.” He shoved the mound into his mouth. He’d hoped it would protect him long enough for the Captain’s attention to wander, but he only waited patiently until Keith had swallowed, then continued.

“That’s good to hear. We’re lucky to have someone as talented as you here.”

Keith flushed. Over the last few months he’d been working on distinguishing a genuine compliment from a sarcastic one, and he was fairly sure this was the former. 

Maybe.

Then, to his dread, Colleen spoke up.

“Got a girlfriend yet?” Her tone was teasing, but still Keith flushed even deeper red and shook his head no. He stared down at his plate to avoid their inquisitive gazes.

“A boyfriend?” asked their son, Matt. Keith hoped Shiro would step in and save him, but at a glance Shiro looked as curious as the Holts. His gut twisted. 

“Uh, no, I don’t really have, um, time for… that stuff.”

The Captain nodded, apparently accepting his excuse. “The Garrison is a very demanding institution.”

“But don’t worry,” chimed in his wife, “You’ll find someone. There’s no rush.”

Keith shrank in on himself. He knew claiming he didn’t want that, never wanted it, in the future or no, would only result in dismissal and, in some cases, concern. A past therapist had actually told him to go to the doctor to look for a hormone imbalance when he said he wasn’t interested in guys or girls. He’d been thirteen at the time.

Across the table the daughter he’d forgotten the name of was looking at him. All the Holts apparently had the same curiosity fueled gaze, and it itched over his skin like insects. 

He kept his head down for the rest of the meal, and thankfully wasn’t asked any more questions. 

* * *

“Hey.”

Keith reluctantly looked up from his food. Not because the Garrison cafeteria’s cuisine was that delicious, but because normally, when someone wanted his attention, it wasn’t for a good reason. As it was, he wasn’t sure what this person in particular could want. She looked vaguely familiar, probably in one of his classes, but as far as he could recall they hadn’t spoken. So what could she want now?

Upon seeing his confused look, the girl smiled and slid into the empty seat across from him. His entire table was empty as a matter of fact, but if he looked over her shoulder at the next table, it wasn’t hard to see how her group of friends were watching the interaction eagerly, smothering giggles behind their hands. 

His shoulders hunched protectively around his ears. That wasn’t a good sign-- it was probably going to be some kind of prank. Even worse, they all had an extra golden strip on the shoulders of their blazers; they were a year above him. A year older, and thanks to the Garrison’s military associations, a year of seniority. 

“I don’t know if you’ve heard,” she began in a faux confidential tone, “But there’s a rumor going around about you, and I’m curious.”

Keith felt his knuckles go white around his fork, but tried not to acknowledge it. If he showed that he was bothered, they’d only get more pleasure out of it. 

“No,” he said gruffly, “I haven’t heard any rumors.”

The girl leaned her chin on her hands, her blonde hair falling over one of her shoulders. He couldn’t quite place her expression. It looked friendly, but there was a slyness to the tilt of her mouth that put him on guard. 

“Well, people are saying that you’ve never kissed anyone before.”

Instantly Keith felt all of the blood in his body rush to his cheeks. Before he could even say anything in his own defense the girl let out a laugh, one that was swiftly echoed by her chittering group of friends. 

“No way, it’s true? But you’re so hot! You can’t tell me no one’s ever asked you out.”

He dropped his eyes back to his food. She was technically right, there had been a few times when someone had backed him into a corner and asked him to go to this or that event with him, but he’d always said no. He didn’t feel anything for those people-- so why should he waste everyone’s time? And normally he didn’t feel bad about that… except for times like these, when people said it like being seventeen years old and not having his first kiss yet was a bad thing.

Maybe it was. He didn’t understand people enough to know. 

“Aw, you don’t have to be sad about it.” She stood up again. “Here, I’ll be nice and help you out.”

His stomach plummeted, and he dropped his fork before it could betray how his hands had just started shaking, crossing his arms to give another layer of protection between the two of them, since she was now standing at his side of the table, staring down at him with a sharp grin. 

“No,” he said, leaning away. “I don’t even know you.”

“You don’t have to know me.” She pressed closer, until he was forced to scoot to the side and let her sit beside him. His skin was crawling under his jacket, and when one of her hands landed on his knee, a lightning bolt of panic went down his spine. “Come on, I’m doing you a favor. Might even be able to set you up with a proper date, if you’re nice.” 

“No.”

She rolled her eyes, and apparently deciding to ignore him, closed them and began to lean in. His breath turned to cement in his throat, and before he even knew what he was doing he’d knocked the girl’s hand off of him and threw himself off the other end of the bench. He heard the other girls giving gasps of surprise and knew he’d left his meal on the table, but he abandoned it and fled the room. 

By the time his next class started a new wave of rumors had started up. The whispers surrounded him, and it was near torturous to hear the sound and know what they were talking about, but not able to understand exactly what they said. The moment classes ended he high-tailed it to his bunk, ignoring the messages from Shiro sitting on his tablet, and tried to find some sort of stability in his classwork. But he couldn’t focus. 

He’d always suspected, but this proved it. 

There was something wrong with him. 

* * *

“We had a bet running, you know.”

Keith didn’t look up from the Red Lion, just gave an irritated shake of his head. He was trying to repair something, and he hated when people interrupted what he was doing. 

“A bet on what?”

A movement caught his eye, and he turned his head just as Pidge popped up from the belly of her own lion, her face smeared with grease and oil. She clambered onto one of Green’s paws to reach for another tool while speaking. 

“My family. We, or mostly they, I wasn’t old enough-- we had a bet running on when you’d come out.”

He frowned heavily at her back. “When I what?”

Pidge dug through her bucket of tools, the sounds of metal clanging together echoing through the hangar. “My dad had twenty bucks on you being straight.”

Then it clicked, and instantly Keith’s stomach sank to his feet. The old familiar feeling of not being right. That Pidge was about to say a whole bunch of stuff that Keith didn’t understand and didn’t know how to ask for an explanation since everyone but him seemed to know it already. And Pidge, who was capable of being as oblivious as him sometimes, kept talking.

“Matt bet that you were gay. My mom went down the middle and said bi.” 

Keith sat back from Red, his knuckles turning white around the wrench he held. He’d contemplated all of those labels before, and more, spending whole afternoons frantically searching the Web for anything that would explain why he didn’t feel things that others did. And he’d never been able to find an answer. 

All he could conclude was that he was just broken, and this was what he’d be dealing with for the rest of his life. People reassuring him that eventually he’d get what he didn’t want. Concern, thinking he was sick. Thinking he was just cold hearted. Thinking he was incapable of love. Trying to pressure him into it, like the time he’d rejected an invitation to a dance and the girl’s entire group of friends tried to guilt-trip him into saying yes. Feeling sorry for him. Treating his struggle as a game to play and put money on, or a riddle to be solved, or a blown fuse that needed to be fixed. 

And for all he knew, they were all right. 

“And what do you think?” he heard himself ask from far away. He felt nauseous as he sat there and stared up at Red’s gray eyes, waiting for Pidge to answer and feel the responding twist in his chest that said she was wrong. 

“I think you’re ace.”

His head snapped up. He hadn’t heard that one before.

“That I’m what?” 

* * *

Finally the light faded away and the flashes ended. He’d started getting used to them after a month on the back of this space whale, but these ones left him shaken. Catching sight of Krolia against the far cave wall, just staring at him with wide eyes, didn’t help his breath come any smoother. 

“Keith? What was that?”

He shook his head. There was no way he could speak right now. He’d spent so much time talking over this problem with Pidge and Shiro, and finally had begun to accept it, to think that he wasn’t broken. Now all of that effort seemed to be for nothing, because now he was terrified. If humans found the concept of not loving romantically hard to accept, how could he expect a Galra to? How could he expect his  _ Galra mother  _ to?

“Keith?” 

He instinctively withdrew, curling his knees to his chest. The wolf pup whined and pawed at him, but he didn’t dare move without knowing how Krolia was going to react. She could be angry. Or disappointed, or disgusted, or sad, or--

A gentle hand landed on his shoulder. Keith flinched at the sudden touch but it didn’t pull away, and it didn’t squeeze or try to pull him anywhere. It just rested. 

“Are you alright?” It was the softest tone he’d ever heard come out of Krolia’s mouth. He opened his in answer, but discovered too late that his words hadn’t yet returned, and another surge of fear washed over him. He couldn’t answer her. She was going to get angry. 

Something must have tipped her off to his anxiety; she didn’t start demanding answers. In fact she didn’t even speak. Instead a low rumble began to roll out of her chest, and Keith felt himself inexplicably begin to calm, tense muscles uncoiling and his breath deepening. The wolf pup wiggled his way into Keith’s lap and licked his fingers. 

He didn’t know how long they sat there for. He knew it was long enough for him to finally uncurl from his protective ball, and long enough that Krolia shifted to sit beside him instead of kneeling in front. But not once did she stop her strange purring, and never did she lift her hand from his shoulder. 

Finally, when she deemed him stable enough, Krolia let the rumble fade away and rubbed his arm briskly. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked. Keith didn’t meet her eyes. 

“I’m-- I don’t know. How much you know about humans, or how the Galra work, and I don’t-- I don’t really know how to explain it--”

She cut off his anxious rambling with a squeeze to his shoulder. “It’s alright. Tell me as much as you want, or nothing, if that’s what you’d prefer. But if you’re worried about acceptance, know that I won’t ever reject you.”

Keith managed a hoarse laugh. “You say that now,” he muttered. “You don’t know me.”

“You’re right. I don’t. I only knew you for a few months, after all.”

He swallowed back the sour taste in the back of his throat. 

“But I still loved you. And for all these years I’ve been gone I’ve loved you, and after all of these memories the Abyss has shown me, I still do. No force in this universe could make me stop.”

That was it. Keith’s foundations had already been cracked from the flashes, and that sentence made the whole dam crumble to pieces. The flood came out as tears pouring down his cheeks that Krolia brushed away, mindful of her clawed fingertips. 

“You don’t ever have to be afraid of me,” she murmured in his ear as the rumbling returned, “My son, my kit, you’ll always be safe with me.”

Keith, surprisingly enough, believed her. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Pride everybody!


End file.
